Bear's Log

I have wanted to put some basic weather info on the main page and knew that I could always parse the data that comes from NOAA National Weather Service – it is structured text. Some google-crawling later I found a number of perl and python projects – after all if I have had the idea then most likely a couple dozen other people have also had the idea. From a flexibility point of view I picked “pyMETAR(python METAR parsing library)":http://www.schwarzvogel.de /software-pymetar.shtml A first pass of working with the pyMETAR library looks very promising. The author has done an excellant job of abstracting the details of a METAR report. Until I finish that bit of glue code I’ve added two basic NOAA NWS links to tide me over. Update: I’ve written some glue code to retrieve the weather report and generate a file that is now included in the right side menu - woohoo!